Helen colijn biography
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Helen colijn biography
The sounds of survival
When Helen Colijn hears the Largo movement of the New World Symphony by Dvorak, a faraway look comes to her eyes.
Dvorak. Sumatra. Barbed wire fences.
Helen colijn biography wikipedia
Armed guards. Voices . . .
The rhythms bring a host of memories--some punishing, some poetic--all of them involving her unique experience as a prisoner in an internment camp in the Far East.
But it is the music she remembers most of all.
"We felt it was something to live for," she says.
It was two days after Christmas 1943 when some of the women of her internment camp on the island of Sumatra put on their first concert inside their spartan confines.
Guards were at their usual posts.
"It was outside, it had a gazebo-type thing," said Colijn, now a Menlo Park resident, who was an audience member. Her two sisters were among the performers.
Their first piece w